When I saw the word "update" I almost leapt out of my chair. I just knew it was 10.5.2 but I guess I'll have to just keep waiting.

That easily qualifies as coercion on behalf of Apple . I'm guessing 10.5.2 update is scheduled for later this week, then, or even worse next week. Don't care how quickly it comes out, as long as it comes out before I receive my Apple TV! "No gadget buying in the end of the month, need money for food instead"

That easily qualifies as coercion on behalf of Apple . I'm guessing 10.5.2 update is scheduled for later this week, then, or even worse next week. Don't care how quickly it comes out, as long as it comes out before I receive my Apple TV! "No gadget buying in the end of the month, need money for food instead"

I'm eagerly awaiting the day that iWork will support right to left properly. I use hebrew quite a lot and it's a real pain to guess where the cursor is when you edit text. For instance, Keynote doesn't put the bullets to the right (no pun intended) side and the cursor is erratic at best in Pages. I don't use Numbers but I suspect that tabbing from cell to cell goes the wrong way round for a right to left table.
Maybe that's the way Apple found to not sell to arabic speaking people?
It's a problem that has been discussed for years and neither Apple nor MS seem willing to properly support right to left languages (on Apple's products). Weird...

Keynote needs some basic fixes, and I doubt that this update addresses any of these more obvious issues that I am having: (1) Plain b&w printing without backgrounds is a pain; (2) The "redo" function always seems grayed-out (and command-y never seems to work); (3) The "Inspector" is clumsy, esp. when it comes to some types of text management (e.g., shrinking space between lines of text) and managing bullets; (4) The "Shapes" menu is woefully inadequate; (5) Hitting the "back" button in presentation mode takes one to the top of the current or prior slide, rather than take transitions back step-by-step.

There are more irritants, but these are my main ones.

Keynote still needs some work.

Tim Cook is gay, believes in climate change, and cares deeply about racial equality. Deal with it (and please spare us if you can't).

Try to create a numbered list with an empty line in between each item. You have manually check "Number continuously" in the inspector each and every time you create a new item to maintain the proper order (or else everything is designated '1'. OR write a huge monoparagraph, then insert line breaks, then manually uncheck the "Numbered List" in the inspector for each of the empty lines.

Microsoft Word will understand what you're trying to do after the first adjustment you make to a list, and perpetuate that until you tell it to stop.

Pages is more "Hey, I can't make that list work out for you, but here are 50 kerning options."

Steve also got up and showed how they made that very cool vacation video with the new iMovie and Steve himself said the Panasonic HDC-SD1 was used to make it. Funny how when you imported the video you had only one sound channel in iMovie. It just got fixed in the past week and he said that crap last year sometime.

He never said anything about 10.5.2 in his Keynote. He did mention that the Apple TV software update would be coming "in two weeks." Technically, that was today, but he could easily have meant anywhere from this past Sunday until Friday. If you don't see the update by Friday afternoon, then you have a reason to complain.

They were demoing the update on the Macworld show floor, so it must have been pretty close to finished. But you never know. They may have encountered some last minute bug that needs to be worked out. I'd rather they got it right than let it out of the gate unfinished.

So I start up "Numbers" and Apple says there is an update available. I click on update and Apple informs me that my version 1.0.1 is the latest and no update is available. So forgive me, but I don't understand. What is this update, 1.0.2 supposed to be for?

Try to create a numbered list with an empty line in between each item. You have manually check "Number continuously" in the inspector each and every time you create a new item to maintain the proper order (or else everything is designated '1'. OR write a huge monoparagraph, then insert line breaks, then manually uncheck the "Numbered List" in the inspector for each of the empty lines.

Actually, you can turn off a bullet for one line much easier. Just hold down shift when you hit return and the bullet skips that line, hit return again and it is there. I don't know how you were expected to know this, but once you do it makes Pages bearable for lists.

Keynote update does seem to fix one thing for me that was a pain. Exporting a slideshow as h.264 constantly failed. The resultant movie file was forever sticking at random points. Very annoying. This seems to have fixed it - at least on the test I performed.

Actually, you can turn off a bullet for one line much easier. Just hold down shift when you hit return and the bullet skips that line, hit return again and it is there. I don't know how you were expected to know this, but once you do it makes Pages bearable for lists.

I'm sure they meant Leopard-compatibility issues. A lot of developers have been late with their Leopard versions because they said that Apple wasn't giving them complete information in the pre-release days and that they made some last-minute changes.

That's probably what happened with the people that develop iWork. Who are they again? Oh, wait, . . . never mind

The language "improves comatability with OSX" is indeed amusing but may be referring to 10.5.2 in advance of its release. Otherwise based on past AppleSpeak, one might have expected "resolves performance issues" or somesuch......

So I start up "Numbers" and Apple says there is an update available. I click on update and Apple informs me that my version 1.0.1 is the latest and no update is available. So forgive me, but I don't understand. What is this update, 1.0.2 supposed to be for?

I had the same problem, make sure the application is in a folder named "iWork '08" in the applications folder.

In iWork 08 there is a button on the formatting bar that sets columns; it appears right after the line spacing adjustment and before the list button.

In both iWork 06 and 08 you can also use the inspector. Click that blue circle with an "i" in the toolbar and the second tab is dedicated to columns. That is where you can change the spacing on them.

Also, if you are working with text boxes you will see little blue arrows on the right side near the bottom of the text box. Click it and it will allow you to connect to another text box so the text that is too long for the first one flows into the second text box. You can use this to create columns with different heights, just for more of a page layout style. (This one may be iWork 08 only - I can't remember).

Yeah I saw all that but what I am talking about is a specific feature that allows you to take a block of text, paste it in a spreadsheet and then have it separate the data into individual columns using delimiters. This is very useful for me and is something I use daily. I routinely have to copy a page worth of reporting data from a web page and send it out in a spreadsheet along with removing several of the columns which are confidential info.

I do thank you for your tip but from your reply it seems as if you are not actually familiar with the "text to columns" feature of Excel.

When iWork came out several months ago I was all over the Apple forums checking into it and there were many posts about this one feature not being included, I was hoping it might have been in a later release.

. . . what I am talking about is a specific feature that allows you to take a block of text, paste it in a spreadsheet and then have it separate the data into individual columns using delimiters. This is very useful for me and is something I use daily. . . .

Oh, sorry I didn't get what you were asking. You are right that I have never used the Text to Column feature.

In your post you said it was a feature of Pages you were looking for. Is that because you activate it from Word and import it into excel, or do you just copy from the report into excel and start the conversion there?

I ask not because I think I can solve your problem, but because it does sound very useful and I would like to know for my own use.